The Detective Stories of Edgar Allan Poe

By Edgar Allan Poe and Kristine Kathryn Rusch

From the father of modern mystery, three classic detective stories featuring one of the literary world’s first amateur gentleman sleuths.
 
Meet C. Auguste Dupin, the first literary example of a brilliant detective created by Edgar Allan Poe, undisputed master of chills and suspense. Follow Dupin’s genius skill at problem solving through three detective cases, Poe’s only three tales with his seminal character.

In these fundamental works of detective fiction, explore the idea that objects can be hidden in plain sight, that the murderer is not who or what you’d think.

Contains:
“The Murders in the Rue Morgue”
“The Mystery of Marie Roget”
“The Purloined Letter”

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Mar 18, 2021
• ISBN: 9781680571004

Edgar Allan Poe

Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849) was an American poet, short story writer, and editor. Born in Boston to a family of actors, Poe was abandoned by his father in 1810 before being made an orphan with the death of his mother the following year. Raised in Richmond, Virginia by the Allan family of merchants, Poe struggled with gambling addiction and frequently fought with his foster parents over debts. He attended the University of Virginia for a year before withdrawing due to a lack of funds, enlisting in the U.S. Army in 1827. That same year, Poe anonymously published Tamerlane and Other Poems, his first collection. After failing to graduate from West Point, Poe began working for several literary journals as a critic and editor, moving from Richmond to Baltimore, Philadelphia, and New York. In 1836, he obtained a special license to marry Virginia Clemm, his 13-year-old cousin, who moved with him as he pursued his career in publishing. In 1838, Poe published The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, a tale of a stowaway on a whaling ship and his only novel. In 1842, Virginia began showing signs of consumption, and her progressively worsening illness drove Poe into deep depression and alcohol addiction. “The Raven” (1845) appeared in the Evening Mirror on January 29th. It was an instant success, propelling Poe to the forefront of the American literary scene and earning him a reputation as a leading Romantic. Following Virginia’s death in 1847, Poe became despondent, overwhelmed with grief and burdened with insurmountable debt. Suffering from worsening mental and physical illnesses, Poe was found on the streets of Baltimore in 1849 and died only days later. He is now recognized as a literary pioneer who made important strides in developing techniques essential to horror, detective, and science fiction.

Book preview

The Detective Stories of Edgar Allan Poe

Book Description

Murder, mystery, and solving crime—the foundations of detective fiction.

Meet C. Auguste Dupin, the first literary example of a brilliant detective created by Edgar Allan Poe, undisputed master of chills and suspense. Follow Dupin’s genius skill at problem solving through three detective cases, Poe’s only three tales with his seminal character.

In these fundamental works of detective fiction, explore the idea that objects can be hidden in plain sight, that the murderer is not who or what you’d think.

the Father of the Modern Mystery, the originator of the detective story, the man who created an entire genre

—Kristine Kathryn Rusch, USA Today bestselling author, from her Foreword

The Detective Stories of Edgar Allan Poe

Foreward by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

Edgar Allan Poe

WordFire Press

The Detective Stories of Edgar Allan Poe

The Murders in the Rue Morgue (1841). The Mystery of Marie Rogêt (1842). The Purloined Letter (1844). These works are in the Public Domain.

Foreword copyright © 2020 Kristine Kathryn Rusch

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the express written permission of the copyright holder, except where permitted by law. This novel is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination, or, if real, used fictitiously.

The ebook edition of this book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. The ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share the ebook edition with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

EBook ISBN: 978-1-68057-100-4

Trade Paperback ISBN: 978-1-68057-099-1

Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-68057-101-1

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Edited by Kailey Urbaniak

Cover design by Janet McDonald

Cover artwork images by Adobe Stock

Interior artwork by Aubrey Beardsley, 1894. All images are in the public domain.

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Published by

WordFire Press, LLC

PO Box 1840

Monument CO 80132

Kevin J. Anderson & Rebecca Moesta, Publishers

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WordFire Press eBook Edition 2020

WordFire Press Trade Paperback Edition 2020

WordFire Press Hardcover Edition 2020

Printed in the USA

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Contents

Foreward: The Original Influencer

The Murders in the Rue Morgue

The Mystery of Marie Rogêt

The Purloined Letter

About the Author

If You Liked…

Other WordFire Press Titles

Foreward: The Original Influencer

Kristine Kathryn Rusch

They call him the Father of the Modern Mystery, the originator of the detective story, the man who created an entire genre. Edgar Allan Poe certainly wasn’t the first person to write a mystery story, nor was he the first to have someone investigate a murder in a fictional setting. If you read widely enough, in different cultural contexts and in many different languages, you’ll find other parents of the modern mystery.

But, in many ways, Poe is the perfect choice as the Father of the Modern Mystery. In three short stories published between 1841 and 1844, he managed to create (or illuminate) many mystery tropes, including the locked room mystery (Murders in the Rue Morgue), and the story based on a real life crime (The Mystery of Marie Rogêt). His detective, C. Auguste Dupin, isn’t a detective at all, but an educated literary type who likes conundrums.

Dupin uses deductive reasoning based on his great intelligence to find answers where others cannot. He also has a sidekick—a Watson, as it were—inventing the trope that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle later made a staple in detective fiction.

Poe’s three detective stories are good, but not my favorite of Poe’s works. My favorites are two of the tales that lean toward horror—The Cask of Amontillado and The Tell-Tale Heart. Both deal with human psychology in an amazingly modern way.

The mysteries are less modern, more products of a bygone age. Poe believed that his strongest story was The Purloined Letter, and he’s right. It’s the final story in the Dupin trilogy—if you can call the stories that—and it shows a growth in the form that Poe underwent as he wrote these stories.

Poe’s untimely death prevented him from writing more stories about C. Auguste Dupin. Others have taken up the mantel—Dupin is the inspiration for Sherlock Holmes after all—but no one managed to combine the grotesque with calm logic. Yes, there was an orangutan in Murders in the Rue Morgue, but even that seems logical in the world of Poe. (And is logical, when you learn that Poe had seen an orangutan on display in Masonic Hall in Philadelphia before writing the story.)

The least successful story of the three is The Mystery of Marie Rogêt. Poe was responding to a true crime, the murder of Mary Rogers in Manhattan in 1841. That murder had become a sensation in the papers at the time, and Poe actually tried to use fiction to solve it. He stuck a bit too closely to the facts for the story to flow on its own, and he did not make that mistake again with the third and final story, The Purloined Letter, which he published a few years later.

The stories are eminently readable. Even though Poe wrote like a man of his time, his language is less flamboyant than the language of lesser writers of the mid-19th century. His characters are real, his settings vivid, and his plots inventive—especially when he stayed away from the details of an actual crime.

Poe’s claim to the title of the Father of the Modern Mystery comes not just from those three stories or the creation of Dupin or even the fact that Dupin’s appearance in three tales marks the first (that I know of, at least) series detective in the English language.

The title also comes from Poe’s untimely and mysterious death. Poe died in 1849 at the age of 40. He was found, delirious and not wearing his own clothes (!) in the streets of Baltimore, and taken to a medical college (which, in those days, was a death sentence in and of itself). He never became coherent again.

Theories about his death abound. Scholars (and people at the time) have suggested everything from possible murder to alcohol poisoning to rabies to some kind of stroke. The medical records and death certificate are lost, and I’m not sure what kind of information they would have provided.

But to have the Father of the Modern Mystery die mysteriously adds to the cachet. Writers have not only purloined Dupin (or a character who resembles Dupin) for their fiction, they’ve also written innumerable accounts of Poe’s death.

Had Poe lived, he might have written more Dupin stories, maybe explored the mystery form some more. He might have been called the father of modern mystery anyway. That’s not possible to know.

What we do know is that the two most influential mystery writers in the English language said they were influenced by Poe’s three short mystery tales. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle acknowledged Poe’s influence on his own writings, not just in interviews, but in the very first case that Sherlock Holmes solved, A Study in Scarlet.

Poe also influenced Agatha Christie’s creation of Hercule Poirot, her Belgian detective. Poirot also uses his great deductive abilities to solve crimes and is just as stuffy and pompous as Dupin can be. (And as Holmes is, for that matter.)

If you remove Poe from the English-language mystery canon, you lose Sherlock Holmes and Hercule Poirot. You lose the early bits of detective fiction, and you lose what came to be known as the cozy mystery—with all of its wild solutions to strange puzzles. (An orangutan wouldn’t be that out of place in some of the cozies being published these days.)

In fact, if you ask the average non-reader to describe what a mystery is, that reader will outline the form that Poe gave the genre—an impossible murder, a puzzle to be solved, with a great amateur detective who can see how all the pieces fit together where the rest of us mere mortals cannot.

Dupin never had the chance to become the household word that Sherlock Holmes is, nor has Dupin managed to star in as many TV shows and movies as Hercule Poirot has. Had Poe lived, Dupin might have had enough adventures for us to create dozens of TV shows about him or games to keep him busy.

As it is, we only have three stories. Three highly influential stories, written by a man whose death is as mysterious as the deaths he wrote about.

The only difference is that we will never know what, or who, exactly, killed Edgar Allan Poe.

All that we know is that the Father of the Modern Mystery died mysteriously. And his work lives on, influencing writers even today.

The Murders in the Rue Morgue

What song the Syrians sang, or what name Achilles assumed when he hid himself among women, although puzzling questions, are not beyond all conjecture.

—Sir Thomas Browne

The mental features discoursed of as the analytical, are, in themselves, but little susceptible of analysis. We appreciate them only in their effects. We know of them, among other things, that they are always to their possessor, when inordinately possessed, a source of the liveliest enjoyment. As the strong man exults in his physical ability, delighting in such exercises as call his muscles into action, so glories the analyst in that moral activity which disentangles. He derives pleasure from even the most trivial occupations bringing his talent into play. He is fond of enigmas, of conundrums, of hieroglyphics; exhibiting in his solutions of each a degree of acumen which appears to the ordinary apprehension præternatural. His results, brought about by the very soul and essence of method, have, in truth, the whole air of intuition.

The faculty of resolution is possibly much invigorated by mathematical study, and especially by that highest branch of it which, unjustly, and merely on account of its retrograde operations, has been called, as if par excellence, analysis. Yet to calculate is not in itself to analyze. A chess-player, for example, does the one without effort at the other. It follows that the game of chess, in its effects upon mental character, is greatly misunderstood. I am not now writing a treatise, but simply prefacing a somewhat peculiar narrative by observations very much at random; I will, therefore, take occasion to assert that the higher powers of the reflective intellect are more decidedly and more usefully tasked by the unostentatious game of draughts than by all the elaborate frivolity of chess. In this latter, where the pieces have different and bizarre motions, with various and variable values, what is only complex is mistaken (a not unusual error) for what is profound. The attention is here called powerfully into play. If it flag for an instant, an oversight is committed, resulting in injury or defeat. The possible moves being not only manifold but involute, the chances of such oversights are multiplied; and in nine cases out of ten it is the more concentrative rather than the more acute player who conquers. In draughts, on the contrary, where the moves are unique and have but little variation, the probabilities of inadvertence are diminished, and the mere attention being left comparatively unemployed, what advantages are obtained by either party are obtained by superior acumen. To be less abstract, let us suppose a game of draughts where the pieces are reduced to four kings, and where, of course, no oversight is to be expected. It is obvious that here the victory can be decided (the players being at all equal) only by some recherché movement, the result of some strong exertion of the intellect. Deprived of ordinary resources, the analyst throws himself into the spirit of his opponent, identifies himself therewith, and not unfrequently sees thus, at a glance, the sole methods (sometimes indeed absurdly simple ones) by which he may seduce into error or hurry into miscalculation.

Whist has long been noted for its influence upon what is termed the calculating power; and men of the highest order of intellect have been known to take an apparently unaccountable delight in it, while eschewing chess as frivolous. Beyond doubt there is nothing of a similar nature so greatly tasking the faculty of